Changing C: Drive to D:

[Guest]

I have all my programs on a 16 Gig Hard drive, which is full. I also have an
additional 60 gig back up drive which is empty. How do I change the order or
transfer the operating system from the 16 gig drive to the 60 gig drive and
still retain functional programs.

 

[Carey Frisch [MVP]]

You may wish to visit the support website of the manufacturer of your
60GB hard drive and see if they have a free utility program that you can use to
accomplish this task. For example, if you have a new Western Digital drive,
you can download their free Data Lifeguard Tools which includes "drive-to-drive
copy capability".
Ref: http://support.wdc.com/download/index.asp?cxml=n&pid=999

--
Carey Frisch
Microsoft MVP
Windows - Shell/User
Microsoft Community Newsgroups
news://msnews.microsoft.com/

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:

| I have all my programs on a 16 Gig Hard drive, which is full. I also have an
| additional 60 gig back up drive which is empty. How do I change the order or
| transfer the operating system from the 16 gig drive to the 60 gig drive and
| still retain functional programs.

 

[Timothy Daniels]

I have all my programs on a 16 Gig Hard drive, which is full. I also have an
additional 60 gig back up drive which is empty. How do I change the order or
transfer the operating system from the 16 gig drive to the 60 gig drive and
still retain functional programs.

Download a free 30-day trial copy of Casper XP from Future Systems
Solutions' website at www.FSSdev.com/products/casperxp/ . You don't
have to format the destination drive, just specify the size of the partition
to be made on the destination drive and then do the copy.

As with all clones of WinNT/2K/XP, don't let the new clone see its
"parent" OS when it boots up as an operating system for the first time.
The "parent" can start up and see the clone, but the clone's 1st startup
should be in isolation from the "parent". Thereafter, either OS can
startup and it will see the other OS as just a "Local Disk" file structure
on another partition. The easiest way to isolate the clone is to simply
remove the source HD from its cable - the destination HD, assuming it's
the only other HD in the system, will automatically become the boot HD.

*TimDaniels*

 

[Guest]

I think I do not understand? If I ghost or mirror the D: from the C: then
everything on the D: will be lost and I do not know if a boot sector will be
created on the new drive. How do I get rid of the old C: before I boot on
the newly created mirror copy of the C: on the D: drive. PHIL

 

[Guest]

How do I find out who makes my D: drive. Please PHIL

 

[Guest]

Hi Carey: This is PHIL. I looked up the make and model numbers of my
drives. I have a C: drive with 16 gigs, an D: with 60 gigs and a backup H:
with 14 gigs. The C: H: drive is a Samsung and the D: is a Maxtor. I used
the utility under Admin. Managment\Computer Managment, and found all the
partictions. I am affraid to make any changes to them like removing the H:
partition and expanding the C: or renaming the drives or even cloning the
drives. I once tried to used Norton ghost which destroyed my computer and
had to reinstall WinXP. So, what is a guy to do???

 

[Guest]

I used the Computer Management tool under Admin. Management, and found some
interesting partitions that were installed. The C: drive has 16gs and also
on that drve is an H: partition called Backup that has 14 gs. The D: drive
has one partition. So how can I work around these partitions. Can I ghost
the C: Drive on the D: drive after a total format with a new boot sector. I
tried Norton Ghost once and it destroyed my computer.

 

[Timothy Daniels]

First, get your terminology straight. "Drive" usually means a hard
disk drive in this context. "Local Disk", a term used in My Computer
and Disk Management means a partition. "C:" refers to a partition
that contains the running operating system. That is "Local Disk C:".
You have an old 16GB hard disk drive where your current operating
system resides in a partition that it calls "Local Disk C:", and you
have another hard drive with a 60GB capacity with a partition on it
that the operating system calls "Local Disk D:". You want to transfer
the entire contents of the operating system's partition on the 16GB
hard drive onto a partition on the 60GB hard drive. If this is correct,
just clone the partition from the 16GB hard drive onto the 60GB hard
drive, as I explained, using a utility such as Casper XP.

*TimDaniels*

 

[Guest]

Thank you Tim, I will. PHIL

First, get your terminology straight. "Drive" usually means a hard
disk drive in this context. "Local Disk", a term used in My Computer
and Disk Management means a partition. "C:" refers to a partition
that contains the running operating system. That is "Local Disk C:".
You have an old 16GB hard disk drive where your current operating
system resides in a partition that it calls "Local Disk C:", and you
have another hard drive with a 60GB capacity with a partition on it
that the operating system calls "Local Disk D:". You want to transfer
the entire contents of the operating system's partition on the 16GB
hard drive onto a partition on the 60GB hard drive. If this is correct,
just clone the partition from the 16GB hard drive onto the 60GB hard
drive, as I explained, using a utility such as Casper XP.

*TimDaniels*

 

[Timothy Daniels]

You're welcome. It will be easiest for you if you put the clone
in the same partition position on the new HD that the "parent"
OS had on the old HD. If the source HD has only one partition,
and the destination HD will have only one partition, the copy
is trivial - just tell the utility to copy the entire source HD to the
entire destination HD. This is the default with Casper XP.
Because the "parent" OS and its clone will both reside in the
1st partition, the boot.ini file copied from the "parent" will be
perfectly valid in the clone.

Otherwise, you can tell the utility to copy one partition from the
source HD and put it either into unallocated space on the
destination HD or to put it into a specific existing partition on
the destiantion HD. Neither of these last 2 options require that
you do any formatting - the image of the copied partition
carries with it the format information to the destination partition.
But if the partition positions are not the same (perhaps because
there are one or more pre-existing partition on the destination HD),
you will have to make a change to the "partition(x)" parameter in
the clone's boot.ini file. Just change the "x" to be whatever the
new partition position is - "1" means the 1st position, "2" means
the 2nd position, etc. You will find boot.in just below the system
root, i.e. at C:\boot.ini . You can use Notebook to edit it.

Casper XP will automatically mark the clone's partition as "active"
so that its boot.ini file will direct the ntldr boot loader. But other
cloning utilities, such as Ghost, require you to actively select that
option. It would be prudent after the copy, but before you disconnect
the source HD, to use Disk Management to check the status of the
newly made partition to see that it is marked "active". Get to
Disk Management by rt-clicking My Computer, select "Manage",
select "Disk Management". If the clone's partition isn't designated
"(Active)", rt-click the new clone partition's graphic representation
and select "Mark Partition as Active" in the drop-down menu.

Then you can shutdown, disconnect the source HD, and restart.
After the clone on the destination HD has booted up and you've
checked it out, you can shutdown again and re-jumper and re-connect
the HDs as you wish. Subsequent startups can be done with either
HD supplying the C: partition (i.e. the partition with the running OS),
and the other partitions will just be seen as other Local Disks, each
having an accessible file structure.


*TimDaniels*